NPR reports: If you fall off a bike, you’ll probably end up with a cinematic memory of the experience: the wind in your hair, the pebble on the road, then the pain. That’s known as an episodic memory. And now researchers have identified cells in the human brain that make this sort of memory possible, a team reports in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The cells are called time cells, and they place a sort of…
Richard L. Hasen writes: Just count the damn votes. We are nearing the end of a ridiculous pandemic-laden election season, where we may hit record turnout despite the most blatant attempt to suppress the vote in a generation. More than 90 million people have already voted, and we may reach a record turnout of over 150 million on election day. I am sure we would have exceeded that number by millions more votes if President Donald Trump and Republicans had…
The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s repeated assertions the United States is “rounding the turn” on the novel coronavirus have increasingly alarmed the government’s top health experts, who say the country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government unwilling to make tough choices. “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday. “All the stars…
The New York Times reports: President Trump’s campaign is raising money for a prolonged political and legal fight long after Nov. 3 and recently began automatically checking a box to withdraw additional weekly contributions from online donors through mid-December — nearly six weeks after Election Day. Predicting “FRAUD like you’ve never seen,” the language on Mr. Trump’s website opts contributors into making the weekly post-election donations “to ensure we have the resources to protect the results and keep fighting even…
Jane Mayer writes: The White House declined to answer questions for this article, and if Trump has made plans for a post-Presidential life he hasn’t shared them openly. A business friend of his from New York said, “You can’t broach it with him. He’d be furious at the suggestion that he could lose.” In better times, Trump has revelled in being President. Last winter, a Cabinet secretary told me Trump had confided that he couldn’t imagine returning to his former…
The Washington Post reports: In the final months of the presidential campaign, prominent associates of President Trump and conservative groups with vast online followings have flirted with, and frequently crossed, the boundaries set forth by Facebook about the repeated sharing of misinformation. From a pro-Trump super PAC to the president’s eldest son, however, these users have received few penalties, according to an examination of several months of posts and ad spending, as well as internal company documents. In certain cases,…
We can and will solve the climate crisis — together. pic.twitter.com/3KbdJ5s5Z6 — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 1, 2020
Pankaj Mishra writes: The late Tony Judt, born in 1948, once spoke of the “pretty crappy” generation he belonged to, which “grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political.” In Judt’s view, too many of his intellectual peers moved from radical postures into the “all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security” in the 1970s and 1980s as the postwar consensus in favor of the welfare…
The Guardian reports: The US has set a world record for coronavirus cases in 24 hours, according to one count with just over 100,000 new infections recorded. The daily caseload of 100,233 – as counted by Reuters – surpassed 97,894 cases reported by India on a single day in September. The news came three days before the presidential election, and as Donald Trump continued to stage large-scale events at which Covid mitigation measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing are…
James Hamblin writes: The human brain makes decisions in two basic modes. One is analytic, which involves carefully weighing costs and benefits and choosing the best option. The other mode is intuitive: doing what feels right. Both have their merits. Intuitive thinking allows us to make split-second decisions. It helps guide our romantic lives and our lunchtime sandwich choices. But it is not the mode that should inform a strategic response to a pandemic. Even casual observers of President Donald…
The Washington Post reports: The phone call in March from President Trump’s adviser carried an urgent message. For days Trump had touted the off-label use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure for covid-19, despite a lack of scientific evidence it worked and amid mounting concerns about the dangers to patients with underlying medical conditions. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro wanted to make sure the administration’s top vaccine expert would be on board with a White House plan…
The New York Times reports: On the weekend of Oct. 10, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon and a prominent new ally, a Chinese billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member named Guo Wengui, gathered at Mr. Guo’s luxury apartment overlooking Central Park for dinner and cigars. Each faced some combination of legal or credibility issues, but on this night they had reason to celebrate: a plan was coming together. That weekend, Mr. Giuliani had delivered…
Olga Khazan writes: Kurtis, a young accountant in McKinney, Texas, likes the thing that many people hate about Donald Trump: that the president has left the pandemic response almost entirely up to local officials. “He left it up to each state to make their own decision on how they wanted to proceed,” Kurtis told me recently. Most experts think the absence of a national strategy for tackling the coronavirus has been a disaster. But Kurtis argues that North Dakota, for…
Heather Berlin writes: Don’t look at the clock! Now tell me: How much time has passed since you first logged on to your computer today? Time may be a property of physics, but it is also a property of the mind, which ultimately makes it a product of the brain. Time measures out and shapes our lives, and how we live our lives in turn affects how we perceive the passage of time. Your sense of time is malleable and…